History of the Labour Party (UK)

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The British Labour Party grew out of the trade union movement of the late 19th century and surpassed the Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservatives in the early 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s, it stressed national planning, using nationalisation of industry as a tool, in line with Clause IV of the original constitution of the Labour Party which called for the "common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service" (this clause was eventually revised in 1994). Labour has had several spells in government, first as minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929–1931. MacDonald and half his cabinet split with the mainstream of the party and were denounced as traitors. Labour was a junior partner in the wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945. Following the 1945 general election landslide under Clement Attlee (1945–1951) it set up the welfare state with...

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